I’ve lived in the United States of America for sixty-five years. I’ve been teaching American literature for the last twenty-seven of those.
My American lit surveys–particularly the sophomore-level general education version–begin with indigenous creation stories and trickster tales before moving to the letters of Cristoforo Colombo, i.e., Christopher Columbus. From there, it’s on to the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas and the American Puritans (including those we typically style as “Pilgrims”). My students and I then read from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, usually winding up the semester with poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
Having gone through some portion of these writings–in both undergraduate and graduate courses–every semester, I have come to believe that the one consistent American experience is that of decay, in all its not-so-varied noun and verb meanings:
to decline in health, strength, or vigor
to fall into ruin
to decline from a sound or prosperous condition
rot
gradual decline in strength, soundness, or prosperity or in degree of excellence or perfection
destruction, death; Merriam-Webster identifies this meaning as “obsolete,” but I think we have a good shot at bringing it back
The United States of America has decayed to the extent that it’s no longer even half of what it thinks itself to be. And if the USA is supposed to be–as it thinks it is–God’s gift to the world, it is now a cheap knock-off of the nation initially imagined, of the nation it might have been if it’d been able to live up to its own ideals and fend off the inevitable decay.
As Emily Dickinson wrote,
I reason, we could die– The best Vitality Cannot excel Decay, But, what of that?
A few years ago (never mind how many), Leesa and I drove to DC to spend a couple of days in the city and take in a Keb’ Mo’ concert while there. Leesa has developed a friendship with Kevin—we get to call him Kevin—over the years (and I’m part of it by proxy), so as is usual for us, we got to go backstage after the show to say hello. As we stood outside his dressing room, Kevin introduced us to his co-star for the evening, who was none other than Taj Mahal. But another less recognizable face was there that evening, and Kevin introduced us to him as well. (Leesa likes to say Kevin introduced us as if we were just as famous as anybody else, which is his generous nature.) That other face belonged to David Brooks, who is a conservative political and cultural commentator whose writing appears often in the New York Times.
Having met Mr. Brooks in that way, I tend to notice his writing when it crosses my field of vision. This past week I saw his name on the NYT Sunday Opinion page. His beautiful essay, which I hope you will read via the link, is titled “How to Stay Sane in Brutalizing Times.” The essay walks us through some “tragic” (in a good way) dispositions of sensibility and mentality, and Brooks summarizes his purpose like this:
I’m trying to describe a dual sensibility—becoming a person who learns humility and prudence from the Athenian tradition, but also audacity, emotional openness and care from the Jerusalem tradition.
His use of the adjective tragic doesn’t seem intended to relate exactly to its meaning in the catastrophes of ancient Greek dramatic tragedy, in which some great hero is ultimately destroyed—or at least brought low—by some fatal flaw such as pride. No, Brooks uses tragic in a less bombastic, less catastrophic sense. What he suggests here is that we look at the world and ourselves in realistic and humble ways, that we live prudently and not arrogantly, that we keep ourselves open to the good and the bad that will come our way and not close ourselves off as being above or beyond the reach of our need and that of others, of relationship, of our humanity in common with all.
One key idea Brooks offers is that our tendency to separate, our increasing tendency to rage, our tendency to dehumanize—desensitize us to the world in which we live. And in our desensitized state, we lose track of the wondrous beauty in nature and in each other. When we could be expanding, growing individually and communally, we are instead contracting into tight balls of rage, anger, and—the root of these—fear.
Such a state of being wadded up tight leaves us unable reach out to others, to feel with and for them, to feel sorry for ourselves for the right reasons such as the joy and fellowship and discovery we’re missing. This also is present in Brooks’s essay, probably nowhere more so than this paragraph:
. . . most people — maybe more than you think — are peace- and love-seeking creatures who are sometimes caught in bad situations. The most practical thing you can do, even in hard times, is to lead with curiosity, lead with respect, work hard to understand the people you might be taught to detest.
This passage, especially its phrase “lead with curiosity,” made me decide to focus this 3rd Saturday Song Story on “Sense of Wonder,” a song I wrote with Mark Chesshir sometime back in the late 1980s. I don’t remember the exact division of labor, but my guess is that Mark wrote most of the music while I wrote most of the words.
Here’s the first verse, sung over an appropriately B-minor chord progression:
A rose, unnoticed, blooms and dies to bloom again— So many such gifts return to Sender unopened. Calendar days fly off the wall in whirling wind, And still the journal lays, blank pages from beginning to end.
Somewhere along my journey to becoming an English professor, I learned that the journal “lies” instead of “lays,” but setting that aside, I like the image of a natural world—embodied in the rose—full of amazing events that fail to amaze us because—busy and distracted—we pay so little attention. I also like the images of the flying calendar days I remember seeing in old TV shows and movies and the journal pages flipping through in the same whirlwind.
Next comes the second section of the first verse:
The treadmill world is small— No place for standing tall— Where the heart is a sleeping giant To be feared and kept tied up.
I’m particularly fond of the image of the heart as like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Do we fear our hearts and the acts of feeling, caring, and courage they are all capable of leading us into?
The chorus will grow as the song continues. This first chorus is short: “Racing the rain and chased by the thunder, / Hold on to a sense of wonder.” We threw in the “oh-way-oh” to mimic the moaning voices of those working through enslavement and imprisonment.
Here’s the two halves of the second verse:
The spark of childhood put away with childish things Leaves the good life tasteless and in need of some leavening. Look to the magic of youth— The no-holds-barred search for truth. The heart is a sleeping giant. Take a chance and wake it up.
Do we take 1 Corinthians 13:11-12 a little too literally? A capacity for joy — a sense of wonder — enriches our lives no matter how old we become. Both positive and negative examples of this are all around us in the people we share family and community with.* One of the ways in which an energetic, youthful sense of wonder can be realized — perhaps the main way — is to “take a chance” and wake up our hearts, unbind them, and let them rise.
The second chorus is longer:
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — walking the world and stalked by the hunger— Oh-way-oh — senses dull from the attack they’re under— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
I like these lines. Even more so than back yonder in the 1980s, our senses are constantly under attack, pummeled by media of all kinds and the excessive drama that all of it seems to wield in ever more dangerous ways. Our senses are drowning in information and misinformation “supposed to fire [our] imagination” when it in fact robs us of imagination, one of the main gifts that should be original in each of us.
And yet the rose continues its amazing cycle of life, which is the idea behind the song’s short bridge:
It is not for things to wonder at that we lack In this catch-as-catch-can struggle with the hourglass.**
We must raise our gaze from our navels (or anybody else’s navel) and take in the world — move through the world — with a sense of wonder.
A rose, unnoticed, blooms and dies to bloom again— So many such gifts return to Sender unopened. Calendar days fly off the wall in whirling wind, And still the journal lays, blank pages from beginning to end. The treadmill world is small— No place for standing tall— Where the heart is a sleeping giant To be feared and kept tied up.
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
The spark of childhood put away with childish things Leaves the good life tasteless and in need of some leavening. Look to the magic of youth— The no-holds-barred search for truth. The heart is a sleeping giant. Take a chance and wake it up.
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — walking the world and stalked by the hunger— Oh-way-oh — senses dull from the attack they’re under— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
It is not for things to wonder at that we lack In this catch-as-catch-can struggle with the hourglass.
[The Mark Chesshir lead guitar break!]
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — walking the world and stalked by the hunger— Oh-way-oh — senses dull from the attack they’re under— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
*I read something recently that said the old grammatical rule of not ending a sentence with a preposition is on its way out, going the way of the injunction against the split infinitive. I’m giving it a try, but I’m not comfortable with either change.
**Here the phrase “catch-as-catch-can” joins with the second verse’s phrase “no-holds-barred” to reveal my long-held obsession with wrestling as the most apt metaphor for our relationships with the world, with each other, with our faith, with God.
The last day Leesa and I felt pretty good was Christmas Eve. She fixed her amazing Christmas Eve meal for two this year: cheese biscuits, scrambled eggs and sausage, two kinds of gravy (savory brown and semi-sweet dark chocolate). After nightfall, we went downtown in Johnson City and walked through the Christmas trees in the parks—Founders and King Commons. The last stop of the day was Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church, where we provided music for the 9:00 PM Christmas Eve Candlelight Service.
We came down with flu on Christmas Day. We’d finished family things a couple of days before, so quiet time at home together was just fine, as long as we didn’t feel too bad. For my part, I’ve been much worse with flu at various points in the past. Our thinking is that having gotten our flu shots this year kept this infection from being as brutal as it might have been. Anyway, the week between Christmas and New Year’s was a lot of ups and downs—feeling good one minute, running a low-grade elevated temperature the next. Leesa would feel bad, and I would feel good; Leesa would feel good, and I would feel bad.
By Thursday and Friday, I thought I was steadily feeling pretty good, but Saturday brought a turn for the worse. Sometime deep in the night—Saturday the 30th into Sunday the 31st—I checked the opening time of my doctor’s walk-in clinic (7:00 AM). A little after 6:30, I woke Leesa and told her I was going to get checked out. Since I’d already had the flu for the week it usually lasts, not much could be done about that. What Dr. Stoots discovered was a touch of pneumonia, for which she prescribed a couple of antibiotics. Leesa and I were to leave that day—Sunday, New Year’s Eve—for a week in Charleston, so I asked if I could travel. Dr Stoots said I could; I just shouldn’t be much around other folks if I was running a fever. (Apparently, a temperature must be 100+ to qualify as “fever”; mine never got higher than 99.8, but that was during the week before our trip.)
Leesa and I believed that Charleston—the Holy City—was a far better place to recuperate than the house we’d been cooped up in all week, so we left a little after noon on New Year’s Eve. By 6:30 or so, we arrived at our personal Charleston entry point: Five Loaves Cafe in Summerville (see link below).
That’s my delicious flounder at the bottom of the picture.
The healing began.
I got in my 10K steps (minimum) every day. On Thursday the 4th, I got over 20K steps.
Here are some places the Holy City offered for healing:
St. Philip’s (the church seen from our room), Church Street on New Year’s Day
The sixty-somethings awaiting their New Year’s Day meal at Fleet Landing
On the Battery with friends Renee and Mike Kidwell
Battery renovation seems almost complete
Almost completely healed on the way out of town at Millers All Day (tie-dyes by Lane Cody)
Raleigh and Lacy were with us as well, but I somehow didn’t get any pictures of them or all of us together. In spite of the lack of corroborating visual evidence, we had a hell of a good time with them.
Charleston—Holy City—see you again in a couple of months.
Here’s a (partial?) list of what I read last year:
Midnight Lullaby by James D. F. Hannah **** (way too many typos, but still a good story/character)
Foster by Claire Keegan *****
Sinister Graves by Marcie R. Rendon *****
Better the Blood by Michael Bennett *****
My Sister’s Grave by Robert Dugoni ****
The Hunt by Kelly J. Ford ****
The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster *****
Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown *****
The Nightmare Man by J. H. Markert *** (didn’t really like the characters; too many monsters at the end)
Code of the Hills by Chris Offutt *****
Beware the Woman by Megan Abbott ****
None Without Sin by Michael Bradley ****
The Ranger by Ace Atkins *****
All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby *** (disappointing after Razorblade Tears; wonderful human truths from the author, but the fiction/mystery needed better editor; I’m aware this is a minority opinion–about the book, not the author)
The Good Ones by Polly Stewart ****
Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner ****
Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger ****
The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias ****
Pickard County Atlas by Chris Harding Thornton *****
Scorched Grace by Margo Douaihy *****
A Visit from the Good Squad by Jennifer Egan ****
Tuesday the Rabbi Saw Red by Harry Kemelman *****
Ozark Dogs by Eli Cranor ****
The Grass Dancer by Susan Power *****
Real Bad Things by Kelly J. Ford ****
Killin’ Time in San Diego, the Bouchercon Anthology 2023 ****
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Goff *****
Black Card by Chris L. Terry *****
Bobby March Will Live Forever by Alan Parks *****
Even as We Breathe by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle ****
Shutter by Ramona Emerson ****
Where We Belong by Madeline Sayet ****
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko *****
Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden *****
Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty ****
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens ****
There might be others. But that seems like enough.
I guess I could say that I’ve read my new novel Streets of Nashville several times through the year.
Who’s Gabriel Tanner, you ask? He’s the central figure of my first novel Gabriel’s Songbook.
The paperback cover from 2017
Yes, he’s fictional, but I know him pretty well. He’s a lot like me in some ways–all right, many ways. But in other ways I won’t go into here, he’s not. In addition to Gabriel’s Songbook, he’s featured in “A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel” from 2021’s A Twilight Reel: Stories. And you’ll probably not be surprised to learn that he’s a background character (but never “on stage”) in my new manuscript novel “Streets of Nashville,” as well as one of the featured narrators in my work-in-progress “Avalon Moon.” So, he’s been a busy guy.
I have a file that I keep on my fictional town of Runion and its people. The file includes dates all the way back to 1818. The note on Gabriel Tanner, whose first name seems to mean, in Hebrew, “devoted to God” or “hero of God,” was born to Kirk and Maggie James Tanner on March 8, 1959. He has a brother named Butler, a cousin named Carter “Cutter” Clements, and a wife named Eliza Garrison Tanner, to whom he has been married twice.
How did I pick March 8, 1959, as his birthdate? The 1959 comes from my interest in having him be roughly the same age I am, and I was born on November 25, 1958. More particularly, I picked March 8 because it was on that day in 1983 (I think) that I recorded “Thunder and Lightning” in Nashville. I was in Bullet Recording on Music Square West (17th Avenue South) with my producer Earl Richards and an amazing group of studio musicians. For several days, we’d been tracking songs for my second (unreleased) album, to be titled Waiting for the Night.
March 8 (a Tuesday in 1983) was the last day of laying down basic tracks for the album, and we had maybe two or three hours of studio and musician time remaining. So Earl asked if I had anything more that I wanted to record. “Well,” I said. “I have this new one that we could try.” (I said something like that. This was forty years ago today, you know, and I was twenty-four years old.) I played the song through once for the musicians, and they were ready to record. I doubt that it took more than a couple of takes to capture the track.
Oh, man, it was gonna be a hit! So said all who played on it and heard it. But it was not to be, as the album never saw the light of day.
Several years later, the “Cody Band” version of “Thunder and Lightning” made it on an Asheville, NC, radio station’s River Rock album and became a local–even regional–hit, making the list of top five requests of the day (alongside Prince, Madonna, and others) for several weeks in a row and subsequently picking up over one thousand plays between January and August.
The song was–and still is–terrifically important to me, so you can understand how its original recording date of March 8 would be assigned the birthdate of Gabriel Tanner.
The voice and pacing of Learning to Swim really worked for me. The novel begins with a brilliant splash of action and then settles into something of an uneasy domestic narrative. It’s uneasy due to the suspense of looming tensions: crime-related (the bad guys are still out there, so the child isn’t safe), pseudo-familial (the child Paul, what he’s been through, Troy’s immediate attachment), sexual and romantic (with Philippe Dumond, with Detective Alan Jameson, with Thomas “Tommy” the history professor). These suspenseful elements effectively keep the story afloat for a good while until Troy’s nervy, somewhat clumsy amateur investigation begins to ratchet up the tensions that lead to a startling climax that subtly mirrors the beginning.
. . . for my contribution to politicizing Christmas.
People exist in this world who believe that certain other people have been waging a war on Christmas. People exist in this world who believed — and maybe still believe — that the 2016 election of Donald Trump was a win for Christmas in this (nonexistent, in my opinion) war.
Consider these 2022 Christmas “tweets” (still a stupid thing to think of as a meaningful pronouncement). Really think about them, setting aside our tendency to valorize our own or demonize the other.
Now honestly, which seems most in keeping with the Christmas spirit? Which the most respectful of the season and its origins? Can the Christmas spirit, given its source in Christ, be shared through sarcasm and bitterness?
I recently completed my annual reading of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, first published on 19 December 1843, one hundred seventy-nine years ago. In “Stave Three: The Second of the Three Spirits,” telling the story of Scrooge’s time with the Ghost of Christmas Present, Scrooge connects Christmas with Sundays (“‘seventh day'”), when the shops are closed and thereby the poor are deprived of a meal. Speaking for himself and the whole family of Christmases past, the Ghost of Christmas Present says,
“There are some upon this earth of yours, . . . who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived.”
What the Ghost of Christmas Present suggests here is that there are those who claim Christ/Christianity/Christmas whose lives and deeds in this world are carried on as if Christ/Christianity/Christmas are names only, dead things that “‘never lived.'”
And now I’ll stray off into a couple of related asides. . . .
Almost one hundred years after Dickens, Joseph Campbell wrote a passage in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces that, from the moment I read it, put me in mind of Donald Trump and his “kith and kin”:
The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world—no matter how his affairs may seem to prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself, the giant of self-achieved independence is the world’s messenger of disaster, even though, in his mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions.
Christians are Easter people, not Christmas people (and certainly not 4th-of-July people). For Christians, Christmas has no meaning without Easter.
Now, here’s a very recent bit of aggressive ignorance from one of Trump’s kith and kin. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert dismissed the Cross and the sacrifice upon which true Christianity is based, suggesting that Jesus wouldn’t have had to die if he’d had enough AR-15s “to keep his government from killing him.” Yes, she really said that.
I used to love hearing my cousin Darwin Reeves sing a 20th-century hymn titled “Ten Thousand Angels,” written in 1958 by Ray Overholt. The chorus goes, in part, like this:
He could have called ten thousand angels To destroy the world and set Him free. He could have called ten thousand angels, But He died alone, for you and me.
An important verse of the song goes like this:
To the howling mob He yielded; He did not for mercy cry. The cross of shame He took alone. And when He cried, “It’s finished,” He gave Himself to die; Salvation’s wondrous plan was done.
This is based on Matthew 26:53, in which Jesus says as he is arrested in the Garden of Gethsemene, “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?”
But according to Boebert, Jesus should have been like Neo and asked for “guns, lots of guns”:
I hope that true Christians — not Xians — will call out Boebert (and her kith and kin) for such crass abuse of their faith and such overt kissing of the gun lobby’s “butt.”
I had some other stuff, but I think I’ll save it for my next 4th Tuesday Political post.
In the meantime, Merry Christmas to all — and all means all, y’all — and a healthy and happy New Year!
This week in ENGL 2110: American Literature to 1865 we’re reading some short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who is, in most moments, my favorite author–certainly my favorite author on the nineteenth century. I won’t get into comparisons here–between Hawthorne and Poe or Irving or Melville or Twain, etc. I find Hawthorne’s quiet (mostly) obsession with history (Puritan history in particular) and his subtly haunted mind resonates with me more than Poe’s terror, Melville’s virtuosity and bombast, or Twain’s picaresque humor. Poe ties me to a chair, my eyes held open by toothpicks, and blathers inescapable madness in my ear (almost exclusively in first-person voice), Hawthorne generally stands aloof from the story with me, calmly pointing out the story–its characters and actions.
In “The Custom-House” sketch that opens Hawthorne’s most famous work, his short novel The Scarlet Letter (1850), you’ll find the bit that I really want to present here. It’s a passage of a couple of longish paragraphs about the imagination and writing haunting stories. These ideas came to mind recently when I was sitting around a fire with friends and the moon was out.
Hawthorne writes about the blend of ethereal, spiritual light of the moon and the physical, visceral light of the fire.
Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly,—making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility,—is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the bookcase; the picture on the wall;—all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child’s shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse;—whatever, in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here, without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.
The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing the effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove further from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.
The above contrasting and blending of moonlight and firelight works not only in the realm of the imagination but also in our understanding of ourselves. “We are spirits in the material world,” as the Police song goes. We might think of the moonlight–in the text and in the photograph–as our souls or, if you don’t believe in the eternal soul, our ineffable selves and the fire as our humanness, our flesh and blood.
In Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” he captures the same idea succinctly in Faith Brown’s pink ribbons. In this image, the soul is, perhaps, white and associated with purity, heaven (and angels), cleanliness, peacefulness. The red portion of the pink ribbons can have positive and negative connotations: flesh and blood, passion (good and bad); the red of blood can be violence or it can be healthy and redemptive. So, Faith’s pink ribbons reveal her to be all of these things, which is what humans are.
I can picture Nathaniel Hawthorne sitting in that empty chair to the left of these photos, staring alternately into the fire and then into the moonlit distance, and thinking such thoughts. . . .
In 1845, American writer Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) published a piece titled “Fourth of July” in the New York Daily Tribune. Fuller follows–probably not consciously–the trajectory of Thomas Jefferson’s thinking when he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia (1782), “From the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill. . . . [T]he people . . . will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money. . . .” Fuller writes:
Those who have obtained their selfish objects will not take especial pleasure in thinking of them to-day, while to unbiased minds must come sad thoughts of National Honor soiled in the eyes of other nations, of a great inheritance, risked, if not forfeited.
While Fuller admires the values with which the United States of America began in the late 18th century, she recognizes that the presence of slavery in the land, the nation’s genocidal acts of Indian removal, the looming Mexican-American War, and other situations betray and mock those values.
. . . the noble sentiment which she [the U.S.A.] expressed in her early youth is tarnished; she has shown that righteousness is not her chief desire, and her name is no longer a watchword for the highest hopes to the rest of the world. She knows this, but takes it very easily; she feels that she is growing richer and more powerful, and that seems to suffice her.
What Fuller recognizes is that many–even most–who cry “Freedom” are really not interested in freedom as a right for all. Instead, their definition of freedom is selfish. They want freedom to do what benefits them, what makes them feel good, what feeds their arrogance. They cry “Freedom,” but what they really want–without thought of consequences even to themselves–is to win elections and beat the other side. Once that’s done, it’s enough. They have no policy platform to try and move forward.
Fuller again.
For what is Independence if it do not lead to Freedom?–Freedom from fraud and meanness, from selfishness, from public opinion so far as it does not consent with the still small voice of one’s better self?
I don’t think many of us remain able to hear that “still small voice.” Our lives are too noisy with what passes for news, too cluttered with our pointless, meandering desires. Our brains are muddled. We have become mean, and we revel in our meanness. We’re bullies. We’re following Xians–that is, Christians without Christ–to the altar of our Baal.
It used to be–in the Civil War, in the Great Depression, in the Civil Rights Movement–that factions within the U.S. could bicker and fight without threatening the nation itself. The idea of the United States of America was transcendent, stretched above our mean pettiness and selfishness. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. The idea of the U.S.A.–“who we are, what we’ll do, and what we won’t,” as Springsteen sings in “Long Walk Home”–seems no longer transcendent, no longer cohesive enough to remain untouchable above the fray.
Even if our better selves prevail today (and I understand that many will have a different understanding of what that might mean), I don’t think it will matter in the long run. We have, I’m afraid, grown too ignorant and lazy to recover. The devaluing of our minds and of education in general is too far gone to be turned around–mostly because we’re now too lazy-minded to do so.
Yesterday, I posted a poem and a few comments about my dad on the 26th anniversary of his walking on from this life. A cousin responded with thanks for Dad’s service. I appreciate that. I really do. But I question whether Dad would even recognize this country–that eats up its poor, that elevates its celebrities to gods, that begrudges and generally rejects every request for fair treatment from the denigrated and powerless–as the country he served.
The Idiocracy looms ahead. I give us twenty-five years. Fifty tops.
A poem for my dad, who walked on from this life to what’s next twenty-six years ago today.
The Veteran’s Cemetery, Early November
Early November, when his autumn work was done, he left us standing stupid and staring at the blue-brown of the coming Appalachian winter.
He left behind the shrinking garden, harvested, the expanding lawn, mowed its final time. He left behind the handy man who could fix anything,
took leave of the newly retired postal worker who never went postal, and abandoned his role as little patriarch, begetter of two sons.
He abdicated head-of-household status, in the house that was never his, left the loved wife of forty-two years and her overbearing weakness—
That night he shed this life like Wednesday’s dirty clothes and would have been surprised by all who braved early snows to watch him lie down in a proud soldier’s grave.
I still think of him often, almost daily. He was a quiet and principled man, and I have tried to emulate him in as many ways as possible. Although I’m sure I caused him to shake his head and wonder, Who is this kid?, he was steadfastly there with what I now understand was his expression of love and support.
I have often wanted him back here, to ask his advice on this or that, to see his expression of joy at watching my sons grow, to sit quietly on the porch with him as evening comes on. But even if he had been able to live the longer life he might have had, he would probably be gone anyway by now. And in most ways these days, I’m glad that he’s where he is, far beyond the reach of the ignorant and arrogant and belligerent madness that has taken over and erased the ideological stance to which he adhered in his lifetime, glad that he’s far beyond the horrific sight of the country he served with such pride on the verge of going down in flames.
